Briggs Cunningham was a man utterly obsessed with cars and racing, and fortunate enough to have been born into enough money to be able to pursue that passion to its fullest. His fascination with racing got started just after WWI, when his uncle would take him to races. By 1940, he was racing himself, in a car that had a Buick chassis and engine, but a Mercedes-Benz SSK body.

After WWII, he was building his own cars, both for other racers and for his own team. His team raced at Le Mans with a pair of Cadillacs in 1950, finishing 10th and 11th. But he wanted to race his own cars, and was soon running his C2 racer in American endurance races.

Cunningham did well in the American races, but his cars were unique fabrications, and the Le Mans rules at the time only allowed production cars to race, defined here as one with a production run of at least 25 units. Thus was born the Continental C3, a racing chassis and a big powerful engine dressed in an elegant Italian body and a full interior. For what was essentially a homologation special, Cunningham took real car to make a surprisingly civilized road car.